I’m going to add a few audio clips here (she says, having absolutely zero idea if she can)…

Ok… I’m adding one audio clip for now (one step at a time, Han 😆)

Here is another excerpt from “Deep Breath” which I started writing in 2017 while knee-deep in IVF ICSI treatment:

THE COST

Gonal F, Puregon, Cetrotide, Clexane, Menopur, Anastrazole, Chlomid, Cyclogest, Neupogen, Lubion, Ovitrelle, Progynova, Prontogest, Orgalutran, Prednisolone, Estradiol…

And that’s just off the top of my head. And no, the list isn’t in order of use. No, I can’t fully describe what each one is prescribed to do. And no, don’t even get me started on the non-prescription vitamins and supplements (Proxeed, Folic Acid, Pregnacare, Inofolic… I genuinely can’t be bothered to go on) on offer. I would need hefty shares in Holland & Barrett to warrant publicising all of that for free.

Please indulge me for a moment while we ponder the cost, nay the grotesque cost of treatment.

The price of IVF varies hugely. From clinic to clinic, case to case. We have to do IVF ICSI, which is when individual sperm are identified and injected into an egg. There’s no natural selection with us! This treatment is more expensive than standard IVF. So, on average a course of fresh ICSI treatment has cost us around £7,000. That is the treatment AND the medication. Many don’t realise at first how it will all add up as you progress. If the treatment is say £4,000 for IVF ICSI. The drugs for us cost around £1,500. The additional non-prescription vitamin supplements are maybe £500. Then the extra treatments come into play. Endometrial scratch £150. Embryoscope £450. Assisted Hatching £450. Intralipids £1,500. Calcium Ionophore £500.

There’s been a lot of talk about the IVF Gold Standard recently. In Scotland, wherever you are you get three NHS cycles of treatment. In Wales it’s two, Northern Ireland one, and in England it has dropped to zero for many Primary Care Trusts. We were entitled to one free round on the NHS in late 2015. I’m not sure whether we’d be entitled to any if we were applying today. The NHS is awash with cuts and we live in a comparatively affluent suburb of London where the powers that be will likely have decided that the gift of life is not worth the financial cost.

We attended the Assisted Conception Unit at our local hospital for our first cycle. To be clear, the freebie nature of that first cycle puts an enormous amount of pressure on you both. Your hopes are raised to naively high levels. Forget the statistics, it’s bound to work first time round! We’re lucky in life! Arguably, the NHS experience isn’t quite as sophisticated as the private one even if the treatment is exactly the same. But, at the early stages you don’t have anything to compare your NHS hospital ACU to. But, with hopes high and the cost of private treatment in the back of your mind, the pressure on that first cycle is enormous. And guess what?? Stress and IVF are not recommended bedfellows.

Talking about it is not only important for the “coming out” of IVF-ers. The more we normalise infertility, the more we help each other out of tricky spots. For example, I’ve long been furious about IVF medication going to waste. If we talked more about the financial burden of IVF, we could possibly see informal “drugs banks” opening up. Yes, you heard me correctly. Drugs banks. Well, if addicts can get help to wean themselves off with methadone dolled out at clinics across the country, why can’t recovering IVF-ers pass on their unused, unopened, leftover medication to the next poor soul? I’m hugely aware of health and safety advocates burning up while reading this, but bear with me. I’m offloading.

I shop around for my drugs now. ASDA has proved slightly cheaper. But, as I write this I’m still mentally prepping myself for a trip to the pharmacy tomorrow at a bill of £790. Scrap that, the final bill was more than £900 (see diary entry 26th October 2017 for full emotional meltdown).

And it’s not just the cost of the drugs. You have to factor in the cost of maintaining the treatment. Some clinics don’t include the blood tests and scans in their quoted prices. Blood tests can cost up to £150 each (and you need a lot of them throughout the treatment so the doctors can monitor your dosage). If you’re new to IVF, you may well need additional bloods taken to check your overall white blood cell count. Your virology test results are valid for two years, after which you have to pay to redo them. Perhaps you also need smears for Chlamydia and goodness knows what else. Brace yourself, because I remember all too well walking out of routine appointments feeling physically violated and financially assaulted.

Let us consider sharps bins. Wow, for bins containing sharps they are remarkably blunt! Not to mention unattractive, and, as it turns out… pricey! We were going to have to start paying for a new sharps bin. You only get one on the NHS, and if you return a full bin without asking for it back once emptied, you may have to purchase a new one?! Sod that. So, last time, we got an industrial size bin. It is half a metre tall. It is also half full. But, I’ll be damned if I risk having it clinically emptied and taken away. Alternatively, if you don’t want to pay for a sharps bin at all, just use a giant tupperware box. As long as you know what’s in it there’s no need to have an illuminous yellow beacon staring at your house guests from the kitchen shelf while they knock back their dinner.

Cost also plays a part in all the extras… and my oh my are there a lot of extras. Dietary supplements, vitamins, sachets of insoluble white power to be dissolved in water. Take the right ones at the right time in your cycle. I once read that I was to eat red food. Red food? Alternatively take copious amounts of Lycopene which contains the nutritious redness that you’d otherwise get in a tomato and is “allegedly” good for sperm production. Or was that motility or morphology? Or who cares, you could just eat a healthy, balanced diet with some actual red tomatoes and red peppers every now and then. Now there’s an idea that

doesn’t cost the earth. You see, there are ways to avoid being exploited. Not all IVFers are obese, lard-slurping layabouts. In fact I’d hedge a bet that none of us are. Those patients who need to lose weight are told to by their doctors and I imagine all IVFers go out of their way to take their doctor’s advice. The general rule in my book is to take control where you can. And your diet is one of the few areas where you can take control. Do everything you would normally do in moderation. There shouldn’t be any peer pressure or sense of obligation to physically rattle with pills and supplements whilst you are also full to the brim with artificially introduced hormones.

Day 10 -- 7th November 2017

Having gone to bed at 9pm last night, I was awake at 5am. No need for the alarm clock for my injections today. I actually feel good. Ovaries aren’t too achey. No nausea. And the injections don’t hurt. I’m starving after denying myself dinner last night to account for the fat drip. Two breakfasts later and i’m hot to trot. Lew and I agreed yesterday to spend less time together over the next few days. Sounds dramatic but when you are both freelance and having a quiet spell of work, it is quite a strain on a relationship to have breakfast lunch and dinner at the same table together, every day. I know we promised to be by the other’s side until our dying day, but there’s a difference between quality time and quantity of time.

So, I walk the dog and spend an hour on the phone to Jane, my brilliant friend who always says it as it is. She tells me she’s worried about us being so public with our IVF diary. Says the most important thing is to care for each other and scrap the videos if it all becomes a bit too much. Jane, unlike almost everybody else, is also brutally honest about this round of treatment. She has a sinking feeling in her gut that it won’t work again. I love her for saying it. It takes the pressure off given that everyone is currently crossing every conceivable part of their body, praying, sending positive vibes and hoping beyond hope that this is our “lucky number 7”. That’s the thing about good friends. Those who know you well, go through the highs and lows with you. She knows that all I want to hear right now is positivity, but she’s confident enough to confide in me her own fears, largely because this round is different.

I don’t want to feel like I should behave in or feel a certain way. I don’t want to downplay my hope or be naive about our chances. I just want to be. And more than anything else, if it doesn’t work, I don’t want to feel that pit of despair i’ve felt before. Because, this time, i’m in control. If it doesn’t work, we’ll move on. We will have learnt more about our case and our problems. We can potentially look at surrogacy, or more treatment. Having a plan, taking control and knowing that there are choices out there for us, is what’s keeping me sane.

I tell Jane of the chat I had with another friend who used a foreign surrogacy service to have her son. This friend looked me in eye with a kind smile on her face and said assuredly “This is going to happen for you, Hannah. One way or another, you are going to have your children”. And that was it. My mood lifted immediately. Jane and I then spend ages discussing how surrogacy might be the best “choice” irrespective of whether I can get pregnant or not! Imagine being able to get yourself into the best physical shape of your life, to be mentally prepared, not knackered, and to work solidly (which I love)... only to then turn round and say, right then i’m off on holiday, only to return a few months later with your child?! I mean, that is sooooo tempting! Let’s face it, even I do ever get pregnant, i’ll be a nervous wreck for nine months and probably a bit of a mess for a while after. Knowing that I could quickly get over the not carrying our baby bit is a relief, but then the other major factor with surrogacy is the cost. Come on Euromillions, come on Lotto, come on scratchy Friday (Lew’s game.. Don’t ask). Come on Money Tree. I know you exist. And I’ll be damned if i’ll let money stand in the way of our life.

So here, I plan to share my diary. Writings that at one point I thought might evolve into a book before I was told by a literary agent that my book proposal was “quite dark. You do need your readers to like you”. Ouch.

5+ years on and I have enough distance from it all now. So this is mid-thirties me (midly edited by mid-forties me).

=======================================================

As of December 2017:
36 F, 36 M
TTC 4+ yrs
No DE/DS
PCO (not PCOS… there’s a big difference)
7 x fresh IVF/ICSI
*1 (NHS) ICSI EC 02.12.15, Day 2T, BFN
*2 ICSI EC 29.02.16, No fertilisation
*3 ICSI EC 01.07.16, No blasts
*4 ICSI EC 31.08.16, 1 early blast, 1 morula Day 5T, BFN
*5 ICSI EC 15.05.17, 2 Day 5T, BFN
*6 ICSI EC 11.07.17, 1 4AA Day 5T, Chem BFP-BFN
*1 FET 13.09.17, 1 3BB, BFN
*7 ICSI EC 12.11.17, 2 Day 5T, BFP, MC ~ 8wks

Ten minutes. A brief dip (read: nose dive) into sheer self-indulgence. Tapping away at the keyboard, my fingers driven by my hormonal stream of consciousness, the laptop soaked in tears. Ten minutes and, just like that, i’ve written an article. My current state of self poured out on a page, potentially for public consumption. Three weeks later, and that page is published in The Times. Right then. We’re now public fodder. BREATHE.

Writing that article was an act of self indulgence. It wasn’t brave as so many people insisted. I’d been struggling to breathe for so long, that I needed to catch my breath, to regroup and seize control of the mess my life had become. Intentionally brave or not though, it did seem to hit a nerve with many readers. The response was overwhelming and incredible and every other cliché I can think of. I wasn’t expecting to be star spotted by some hard-nosed literary agent for my thus far hidden scribbling talent. That said, I found the experience of writing cathartic. A creative outlet I never thought i’d enjoy so much. And, as such, I’ve taken self indulgence to a whole new level and started writing a whole bloody book.

A theme that will feature prominently in this account of my, or I should say our fertility journey, is that of ‘control’. The need to take back control of your life and find a different approach to the same long trodden path. I hope this book speaks to fertility patients - crassly dubbed as “IVFers” (please forgive me all you IUIers and the like out there) - but also to those who simply want to understand the experience of the many millions of us in the UK alone who struggle to create a family. This book takes on the bigger-picture difficulties of dealing with and talking about fertility treatment, whilst also giving a diary insight into our Round 7. A fresh cycle of IVF treatment which we began in late October 2017.

To recap our case, we began treatment in November 2015 after many blood tests, surgical procedures (on both of us) and scans. Oh, and after the shortest “honeymoon period” in history. We were only entitled to one fresh round of IVF ICSI on the NHS. Ask me honestly? We were convinced it would work first time. Although we would both more likely rip an arm off than use the term #blessed, we are both very aware of our lucky streaks in life. Lewis always lands on his feet. The kind of guy who leaves his wallet and passport on a train only to have them handed in, cash intact and identity unforged. I was arrogantly confident that being married to me wasn’t going to sully that good fortune, so we went into fertility treatment wide-eyed and woefully naive. There’s an element of showmanship in us both, so there was a decent chance we’d get to be even more special, even luckier, with an even more charmed story, showing off our triplets in a year or two (two embryos, one split, so identical twin boys and a girl, obvs). Shit, i’m daydreaming even as I write. Where were we? Oh yes, the naive hopeful good ol’ early days of Round 1. After a decent harvest of eggs, we only had one fertilised embryo. It was probably the case that the embryo had been fertilised by the only good looking sperm we had. But, hey, it only takes one, right? Minimum input for maximum output, Lewis proudly declared whilst revelling in his genetic efficiency.

After transfer, and as in every case, the embryo (or embryos if you’re lucky) is in the lap of the “gods” (read: chance for the more rational minded and cynical among us). I’m quite sure our embryo never made it past day three. Apparently, the first stages of an embryo’s development are determined by the egg, then the latter stages are down to the sperm. True or false, this is what we were told. By a professional. So, this is what we believed to be the case.

The inevitable failure came and we were crushed. But, it helped us make a few key decisions going forward. We didn’t want to go ahead with any more transfers unless the embryo/s was at blastocyst stage. That’s around five or six days after fertilisation. A blastocyst embryo has split and multiplied into an increasing numbers of cells and is on the cusp of hatching out of its shell ready to embed itself in the uterine lining. Ahh the miracle of human reproduction - sexy isn’t it?! Given that you can’t know what’s going on with the embryo after transfer, we knew we wanted to keep our embryos in the lab for as long as possible to watch their development and assess our chances of implantation. Legally there is a limit to the number of days you can grow a human embryo outside of the uterus. Makes sense, I guess. Otherwise we’d be growing human beings in laboratories. Now there’s a thought… and that’s a whole other book.

After Round 1, we went head first into private treatment. Not knowing anything, we just picked up snippets of advice as we went from one £350 consultation to another. And it really is snippets, by chance, depending on which consultant is scanning you, or which nurse is giving you an injection demo, or whoever is sitting opposite you in a waiting room or, even, how good your hearing is when straining to listen to someone else’s diagnosis and advice. After three failed cycles in one clinic, we switched. We wanted something a bit more low key, somewhere personally recommended, less public, with a carpark so you could actually drive in rather than battle London transport when you’re waddling around with a follicle farm onboard.

I realise I may be jumping ahead slightly here, but to me those first few rounds of treatment all blur into one. A kind of process we had to go through to find out more about ourselves and our situation, but one that my brain has kindly compressed and locked away - useful information retrieved, useless emotional energy expended. So, allow me to jump forward to Round 7. Prior to this cycle, the closest we had come to success through all of our treatment was a chemical pregnancy. It was devastating to get a positive Beta HCG test only to retest a few days later and get a negative. But, there was a huge amount of positivity to take from that negative. The fact that we got that far is a good sign and apparently such miscarriages or chemical pregnancies after a few days are very, very common for people trying to conceive naturally as well as unnaturally (sounds so wrong?!). The optimist in me felt like we were finally inching towards the realms of normality… a landscape we have been trying to reach for an age.

The trouble with IVF is that it’s all played out in real time from the very early stages, before you’ve even had your period. You can potentially know about a failure before say another couple conceiving naturally would even be aware that they were pregnant. With all the many hurdles you know lie ahead, you can start to feel like something of an expert. But the reality is the complete opposite. As a newsreader, my job is to know a little about an awful lot. As a patient, I know way too much about much too little. And quite frankly, that fucking sucks.

By the time Round 7 came round, we were outed. I’d written the article in The Times and become a member of a now flourishing TTC community on Instagram. Everyone knew and it felt good. So, Lewis and I decided to play out a fresh round of treatment very publicly indeed. I don’t think we would have chosen that path earlier on in our treatment, but we had reached the stage of knowing what to expect, boredom, exhaustion, frustration.. And simply a willingness to try anything new to see if it would help us through the process. If it helped anyone else, bonus. But, i’ll be honest and say “Our IVF Diary” was at its core a selfish endeavour. I wanted to help me. I wanted to make sense of what this was and why it was happening to me. I wanted to feel normal and take a look at who “me” was after all the years of trauma.

I feel I should add a pretty major disclaimer to the narrative of this maybe-book. It was written at various peaks and pits of my mental health. At times i’m an angry writer, and i’ve tried my best to reserve the most emotion for the diary entries. However, on reflection, the anger and emotion have seeped through my fingers and beaten my poor keyboard with a vengeance. I’ve no doubt that you may also think of me as a whingeing, aggressive, lunatic from time to time. If that’s the case, that’s because that IS the case. This is me, warts and all.

Ok. Let’s kick off with something you rarely hear about from fertility patients… the build up to the treatment. Namely, prescriptions written, drugs sought and bought, and in my case, trying to plan the next six weeks of my working and social life without too much disruption. Welcome, reader, to the pre-cycle:

Pre-cycle - 26th October 2017

Drugs run. Half an hour drive from home. It turns out my prescription was so long it spread onto two pages and my doctor only signed the end of the second page, not the first. *Major* headache. Am in a rush, car parked on a meter. I call the clinic, they promise to post the signed prescription sheet. I can’t even get the full prescription as Cetrotide isn’t in stock. I plead with the pharmacist. We’ve already spoken three times on the phone over the last week … we’re now in this together. My brief research (and previous experience) tells me it Asda be Asda on price (she says as she lightly pats the back pocket of her jeans — Oh no, hang on, the Asda woman is always a Mum doing the weekly shop for her family of five. I am definitely not the poster girl for Asda). Sarita consents to giving me the drugs. She does the maths and nervously tolls it all up on the till. That will be £901.19 please, she says wincing. Fuck! And that’s not even everything on the prescription! No time to complain, I’m 30 mins from home, I’ve got to get half this medication into the fridge asap. And, arguably most importantly, I need to get to work in the middle of London and put my game face on. Quick stop at Maccie Ds Drive Thru. Hungover husband will love me forever, and when you’re £1k down before 11am, only a chocolate milkshake and McNuggets will do.

As promised, here is a throw back nearly ten years to why I decided to document my experience of infertility and the impact that this had on my life at that point.

I hope this might be a good explainer for someone at the very start of their journey.

More to come…

Because, while I was ‘Hannah Vaughan Jones, CNN Anchor’ professionally - off screen I was ‘Hannah Vaughan Jones, Utter Mess’.

The bulk of my thirties was spent coming to terms with not being able to conceive naturally and then going through IVF, with all the emotional and physical toll that takes on you. Juggling my work and my health for so many years may have seemed manageable at the time. But trauma manifests in a multitude of ways, and in hindsight the experience nearly broke me.

Nobody watching would have known but there were countless times when I popped up on screen just minutes after being told that my latest attempt had failed or after injecting myself with hormones in a cramped toilet cubicle.

While admittedly my workplace wasn’t the norm, it’s clear from my experience and stories from friends and strangers alike that society underestimates what infertile women go through. Without doubt this societal standard seeps into every workplace and has become increasingly toxic for the overall workforce.

If you’re pregnant, allowances for hospital appointments and time off are enshrined in law, but the same doesn’t apply if you’re trying - and in many cases - failing to conceive. There’s no statutory right to time off for IVF even though it is a medical treatment. Any suggestion of it being an optional lifestyle choice is way off the mark, because while infertility isn’t life-threatening, it is absolutely life-changing. Treatment cycles can take days, weeks, or months, with a myriad of hormone and steroid cocktails thrown in for good measure at an extortionate cost. And if your body isn’t playing ball, the whole thing (minus the refund) can be cancelled last minute leaving you very much back to square one. Distraught, deflated, sadder, poorer. This state of vulnerability is the reality for thousands of Britons, and that’s why I applaud MP Nickie Aiken’s proposed bill to allow employees paid leave for fertility appointments.

Just facing up to the fact that you might not be able to have a child throws your world into turmoil. All control and sense of identity is stripped from you. For many women, like me, this happens at a time when so many other pieces of your life are falling into place. You’ve likely found the person you want to spend your life with and you feel established in your career. Lewis and I had been together since our late twenties and both knew we wanted kids. When we got engaged in 2014 we had already been trying for a baby for sometime. By the time we got married a year later we had been told in no uncertain terms that “this isn’t going to happen for you” and within weeks of wedding bells we were both undergoing procedures to ready us for our first (and only) NHS funded cycle. Ours was the perfect storm - neither one of us solely to “blame” for our failure to conceive. I had polycystic ovaries and a bicornuate uterus which might jeopardise my ability to carry a pregnancy to full term. Lewis’s sperm count was low. But aside from these diagnoses, the phrase we heard again and again from doctors was “unexplained infertility”. Refusing to accept such a diagnosis, I decided that “unexplained” simply meant “unlucky” rather than “unlikely” and we spent the next four years enduring fifteen rounds of treatment at a whopping £80,000 price tag. In the end we were lucky, incredibly so, and we are parents to our now toddler son.

When embarking on fertility treatment the first thing that is abundantly clear - cost aside - is that this is going to determine and dominate your social life, holidays, family gatherings and work life. I was on contract with my employer, not staff. I’m enormously grateful for that now, not because I didn’t think I’d be supported if I were a formal employee, but because I didn’t have to explain anything to anyone. I was embarrassed and wanted to keep my failure private, and my success public. I guess I was the classic swan - poise and serenity above water, frantically paddling beneath the surface.

When I was offered work I took what I could do, turned down what I couldn’t. Injections that required a clinic visit could be scheduled without having to tell anyone why I needed the time off. That’s another bonus of my job - the shifts are relatively short and rarely 9 to 5. I know of countless women who have taken sick leave or unpaid leave, or even quit work altogether, just to fit in treatments. A friend told me how she would camp out in the cafe around the corner from her clinic waiting to be called for blood tests - several of them in just one day. It is that regimented, and saying no just piles more on to the guilt list of why you might actually be to blame for not trying hard enough to have a baby. The stress is unbelievably hard to manage. All too often, women choose to quit rather than be seen as underperforming by their employer. Especially given the reality that not all employers show compassion as a priority. Right now, infertile women have to rely on the goodwill of a sensitive employer.

Another bonus of my profession is that not everyone can present a news show. As a freelancer, I was far less disposable to CNN than so many others who fear not being offered work again if they have to cancel or mess about the rota at the last minute. It’s also a well paid job meaning I was in the financial position to turn down work when it clashed with appointments or procedures or when I just feeling unwell. In addition I was incredibly lucky to share a workplace with a group of supportive colleagues, most especially the makeup artists.

I will forever have a place in my heart for the men and women who dried my tears, reapplied my mascara, gave me privacy and space for my injections, and just backed me up. Often, minutes before a live show, I’d hear ‘Where is she?!’ followed swiftly by ‘She’ll be there in a minute!’. They never doubted that I would make it to the studio on time.

Everyone needs a squad behind them but it shouldn’t be down to the luck of having great co-workers picking up the emotional burden. All employees must be supported at work if they find themselves in this situation. And if they require time away from work for medical treatment, it must be available as a legal right without any nagging fear that if you say you’re doing IVF you might be considered less capable or reliable in your job. While infertility manifests differently for everyone, what we all need is compassion and flexibility. Compassion that recognises the struggle is real no matter what stage you’re at, and the flexibility to deal with it in your own time. I remember vividly having to pick myself up from the heartbreaking ‘I’m sorry, it hasn’t worked’ call from the clinic nurse. A call which loosely translates to ‘the last six weeks have all been for nothing’. I was on the train to work, took the call, cried behind my sunglasses, made it to the makeup wizards and shortly after broadcast to the world. I felt hollowed out. The pain was visceral. But I knew I needed to do my job, to feel good at doing something I was succeeding at. And so on that day, as with so many others, I performed my duties. A job well done.

It was certainly difficult at times to manage the disconnect between my personal and professional life. In Manchester for the 2017 concert attack, I remember having to dash back to London because I hadn’t packed enough medicine (try explaining that to bemused producers who couldn’t understand why the local pharmacy wouldn’t stock my Gonal F). The story we were covering was far bigger and more tragic than anything I was going through so it didn’t feel right to bang on about my sad little story. In all honesty, there was also a niggling thought in the back of my mind that if I told CNN I was trying to have a baby, they might start looking for another freelance anchor. We were nominated for an Emmy award after our coverage in Manchester. On reflection I guess it’s quite sad that despite the accolades and perceived success, I was a 21st century woman still feeling anxious for my career prospects alongside possible motherhood.

Those friends I did eventually tell at work were incredibly supportive. I remember arranging to meet colleagues after a midweek late shift ended. I needed to be social. But I also needed an injection administered precisely 35 hours before my consultant was due to puncture the follicles around my ovaries and (hopefully) collect lots of mature eggs. In addition, my husband and I hadn’t actually spent any time together - without our consultant - in months. I felt like a shell of my former self. ‘Presenter Hannah’ had just nailed a major show, ‘Friend Hannah’ was severely lacking in banter, and “Wife Hannah” just wanted her husband to drive into London, stick a needle in her bruised tummy, and then politely disappear so she could down a cocktail.

That treatment didn’t work. In fact 14 cycles of treatment didn’t work. Somehow we moved into a mindset that we would still have a family, but it might look different to what we’d imagined. We even signed up to donor conception. Remarkably, it was a chance conversation with our consultant when he reminded us that we did still have two embryos on ice. They were poorly graded meaning they didn’t look great and the results of the genetic screening had been inconclusive. Did we want to discard them or use them, knowing the odds were massively stacked against us? We were at the end of our journey and knew I wouldn’t go through any more hormone stimulation or egg retrievals. So we agreed to “just shove them back in” and see what happens. In the Spring of 2019 I worked my socks off freelancing for CNN, WHO, and a host of other clients. I’d just got back from Stockholm when I realised the two week wait was up and it was my “official test day”. I peed on the stick, brushed my teeth and then looked down to see “Pregnant 2-3 weeks”. Confused, in disbelief, and on auto pilot I dutifully bounded off the gym for a weights workout. I left the pregnancy test in the bathroom for Lewis to see when he woke up. After the shock subsided, our first reaction was to agree that this pregnancy was unlikely to go the distance - so attuned we both were to failure. But by the time we reached our 12 week viability scan, Lewis said we can cry about it if it all goes wrong, but for now, let’s just be happy.

Ultimately I left CNN and took on more private clients. Our little lad, Sonny was born just before Christmas and I have forged a career as my own boss. I know my story is unique. The pool of freelance news anchors is relatively small in the UK, and not many fertility patients will be able to undergo as much treatment as me. That said, even with my little boy at my side and the juggle of mothering a busy toddler with a busy work schedule takes hold, I will never be able to fully forget the trauma of infertility. It is built into my muscle memory. It changed me as a woman, as a friend, as a colleague. After the last two years of pandemic and grief, we as a society are in need of more empathy for ourselves and each other. Compassion, respect, and understanding is what we all look for in those around us. Surely that’s not too big an ask of your boss either?

This wasn’t exactly how it all started. This was 2017, a good three years into discovering motherhood wouldn’t be as easy as i’d always assumed. I’m the daughter of a midwife, with childbearing hips, who always believed I could decide exactly when and with whom I wanted to get pregnant. But along came the “unexplained infertility” of PCOS (polycystic without the syndrome), the bicornuate uterus (heart-shaped but less cute than it sounds), the month after month of Big Fat Negative test results, the male factor infertility, the hidden cervix. When I list all this now it all sounds pretty explicable to me so I guess the diagnosis was just a medical way of saying “sorry, we don’t know”.

Discovering you are infertile is a complicated path. It’s shameful, confusing and isolating and I didn’t want anyone to know until I could no longer bear the burden alone. So, after a chemical pregnancy on our sixth round of IVF treatment, I sat and wrote this article. Lewis read it and said it should be published and read by more people than my measly social media following. So I sent it round to some editors and Nicola Jeal published it in The Times. What followed was an overwhelming flood of messages to both me and Lewis - from strangers, old school friends, close friends, relatives, neighbours, politicians, colleagues - saying thank you for articulating the grief of it all and how brave I was for saying it while we were still in the trenches of treatment.

This article gave me a sense of control and empowerment that I’ve harnessed ever since. A rebirth, if you will, and you’ll excuse any crap pun. I realised I could own my story and narrate it in my own voice. Having spent years as a broadcaster, telling other people’s stories, I hadn’t been confident enough to tell my own - I thought I would sound self-indulgent, even silly. I worried that my writing style was too personal (I write how I speak) and mostly I worried that because I wasn’t an expert in infertility I didn’t have the right to speak about my own experience. It would all just fall flat and i’d be ushered out of yet another room - embarassed, crushed. But, The Times published everything I had written in that crumpled up mess on the sofa on a rainy Autumnal evening. They published it word for word. Any other journalists reading this will know the deep joy of “no edits needed”.

Lewis and I went on to produce a YouTube series called “Our IVF Diary” which documented in real time our next round of treatment after this article was published. Again, it was about reclaiming the narrative and putting some purpose into the seemingly never-ending rollercoaster of infertility. I will perhaps write more and share this YouTube series in future posts here.

But really, this was where it all started for me. Vulnerable, accepting, admitting that I was sinking. That I was a shell of the woman i’d imagined myself to be. That my body had let me down. That I had failed. That I would never be the same again no matter how the story ended.

Spoiler alert… the goal was to be parents and the goal never changed. We just moved the goalposts.

The story continues…